How does Podia integrate video hosting and streaming into their platform, and what is their monetization strategy for this feature?

Len: Video hosting and streaming are part of the all-in-one package that we offer for creators. The promise of Podia is that it's the only platform that you need to sell your digital products. Being able to post your videos there without using a third-party provider is a big part of that because the options for creators to self-post are not that great. They can post on YouTube for free, but then their audience is anonymized, and the platform markets competing videos alongside theirs. Or they can host on a premium video provider and pay for it, but the cost can be really prohibitive, especially for small business owners that have large video libraries. 

So Podia offers hosting as part of the product, and we are able to use our volume to leverage better pricing than any individual creator could ever dream of getting themselves. Even with that, it's still the largest line item in our COGS. Continuing to stay on top of that cost and renegotiate those contracts as we grow is really important for us. That's the role that hosting plays. We use Wistia on the back-end for hosting video. 

For live streaming, we integrate with Zoom and YouTube Live because we haven't seen an API that's really done everything we want it to do for streaming video. So we're letting Zoom and YouTube do the engineering work for us on this.